Like this:

Today I had a conversation about anger with a colleague in which, ironically, I laughed until I cried and nearly slipped from my chair in the process, laughter somehow leaching all strength from my limbs. Go figure.

Anyway, the point of this post is to ruminate on the relative merit of my colleague and I’s differing responses to anger and how we deal with it. At the time of the anger, she —whenever possible— violently bakes …

…and I batten down the hatches and seethe, hoping that no one I actually like makes it into the blast radius…

…(while secretly hoping that someone I don’t like does).

When discussing the anger-inducing situation later on, I attempt to retell events in a calm manner and not let myself get re-wound up

my colleague just lets rip with a full-volume retelling complete with wild gesticulations, but injects humour into the retelling.

So which is the better method? Seemingly uncontrolled venting which can be, frankly, scary for the audience OR theoretically controlled bottling which may indeed backfire if just enough additional pressure is added inside the bottle?

Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Zodiacand perhaps most famously, Cryptonomicon, has certainly penned another wonderfully intricate yarn with The Diamond Age. Owing to the hints that Miss Mathesson is the erstwhile Y.T. of Snow Crash (this inferred from the ‘many spoked smartwheels of her wheelchair’, her admission that she was a ‘thrasher’ in her youth and the frequent use of the phrase ‘chiselled spam’) among other references, this world conceivably occurs sometime after the events of Snow Crash.

Amazon’s blurb for The Diamond Age is this:

John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw’s daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the “book” has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.

The great thing about this book is its vision of a not to far future world and the complexity both of that world and the plot that unfolds within it. The strands of story are at first hopelessly disparate, but weave together in some truly ingenious ways. What sucks about this book is the ending. Stephenson, like many science fiction authors, leaves his endings open, sometimes leaving threads unresolved. With The Diamond Age, however, he takes this to whole new levels of irritating by suddenly terminating the book mid-climax. There is no resolution to be had here, it is as if the printers forgot to append the final pages. I’d hate to be this guy’s wife.

Poor ending aside though, this book is a multi-hued pleasure to read. Stephenson blends styles and tones aptly and adeptly and leaves plenty of food for thought with his ruminations on the socioeconomic effects of ripened nanotechnology and, in particular, his discussion of the ultimate moral crime and measure —hypocrisy.

“Candy Bar Girls” is an upcoming UK programme about real life lesbians in the wilds of London and touted to be a ‘social inquiry’, not a titillative exposé of some poor saps seeking their fifteen minutes. Only time will tell whether Channel 5’s strapline for the show ‘real girls, real lives, no clichés‘ will disappoint, but let’s be honest, when has a programme based on the ‘drama’ surrounding the lives of ‘real’ lesbians not included —just for starters— a cast of women who conform to the media-prescribed ideal of female beauty.

Autostraddle is carrying an article today on its own misgivings about the show’s ‘social inquiry’ and I agree with Autostraddle’s foreboding, but in addition I have concerns about what another lesbian programme means for the Saturday night environment, i.e. a resurgence of fauxlesbianism. By fauxlesbianism I mean what the Urban Dictionary terms a fyke, profauxlesbianism (my coinage) being the predisposition towards or encouragement of fauxlesbianism. Profauxlesbianism, by the way, was until this post a googlewhack and as a single word it still is. Score one for the malleability of the English language, but back to the point which is: fauxlesbians cause the validity of actual lesbians to constantly be questioned. ‘I’m a lesbian’ becomes insufficient as an explanation [however partial] for why a girl is not interested in a man who has so many times before seen ‘lesbians’ go home with men. I’m not saying that giving lesbians, er, exposure on national television is a bad thing, invisibility and silence have long been the tools of oppression, but the way they are exposed [often literally] fosters more problems than it solves.

Image source: Fox.com/fringe. Created and produced by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Fringe began airing in 2008 on FOX and has recently been picked up for a fourth season (FOX, 2011).

This discussion of narrative extensions will use US TV serial Fringe (Abrams et al, 2008) as a case study. Following the trend for shows that have “tightly interwoven plots, extended story arcs, recurring emphasis on backstory and program history” (Jenkins,2006a) and now nearing the end of its successful third season, the primary text (Fiske, 1987 in Askwith, 2007), Fringe,has numerous narrative extensions, both official and grassroots, and both secondary and tertiary texts (Fiske, 1987 in Askwith, 2007), of which a detailed list can be found in Appendix II. The focus here will be on the two official comic series, Imagine the Impossibilities and Tales from the Fringe and the main Fringe website, FOX, and the grassroots sites Fringe Television and Fringepedia. For the purposes of this discussion, audience/viewers (‘fans’) will be referred to in the following binary distinction: ‘passive’ audiences that wish only to receive the ur-text (Jenkins, 2007a) —or mothership (Toschi, 2009)— to the exclusion of any extensions and ‘active’ audiences for whom the ur-text becomes insufficient to sate their ‘hunger’ for the storyworld. The argument will conclude that, despite the points of detraction raised and having addressed the needs of passive fans, for active fans narrative extensions function to enhance enjoyment, by enabling both solitary extratextual pleasure and by engagement with a multi-functional community of people intellectually and socioemotionally (Baym, 1998 in Jenkins, n.d.) invested in the same storyworld.

Active fans can engage with a range of program extensions (see Jenkins, 2007b) that broadly serve to fulfil fans’ needs for two things: storyworld knowledge and storyworld community, that is, a sense of “social and civic involvement… more immersive, enjoyable sense of entertainment.” (Ems, 2007:4). Storyworld knowledge refers to the desire for the acquisition, distribution and discussion of canon material, including reviews, speculation on motivations and future occurrences with a community of other interested individuals. Murray (n.d., in Jenkins, 2009b) calls this the ‘encyclopedia impulse’ and the resulting knowledge pools are what Levy terms ‘cosmopedias’ (1997, in Jenkins n.d.). These activities often take place within predisposed/dedicated areas, both official (FOX, Fringe Division) and grassroots (Fringe Television and Fringepedia to name just the most comprehensive). Such areas and the people who frequent them are referred to as communities and these communities are lived largely online, where there are very low barriers to participation (Jenkins, 2006c) for anyone likely to watch Fringe. Communities arise from these shared knowledge pools of individuals and enable engagement with the text in the above ways, plus as enabling participation in various subtextual games (e.g. ‘eastereggs’ like the commercial-glyph decoding (see Appendix I and II), hidden glyph and Observer spotting and, retrospectively, next episode clues). Many of the sites link to each other, e.g. Fringe Television has a comprehensive link list at the bottom of the ‘Fringe eastereggs’ page to both unofficial and official sites (including the alternate reality games via MassiveDynamic.com and ImaginetheImpossibilities.com), they host Fringe Benefits Inc podcasts, the Fringe Wiki tab is a direct link to Fringepedia and so on. This can be compared to FlashForward, a show whose narrative extensions were mainly notable by their absence, much to the disappointment of fans who have come to expect transmedia extensions (Jenkins, 2009a).

Operating on the principle of worldbuilding (Freeman, 2008, in Toschi, 2009) narrative extensions of Fringe add to the enjoyment of fans by allowing them to not only immerse themselves in a complex storyworld by offering supplementary information/activities, but also to ruminate on possible directions the plot may take and motivations the characters may have. Sometimes this speculation germinates fanfiction. “Fan speculation may […] seem to be simply a deciphering of the aired material, but increasingly, speculation involves fans in the production of new fantasies” (Jenkins, n.d.) which may serve to fill perceived gaps via the tertiary texts (Fiske, 1987 in Askwith, 2007) that are fanfiction (Jenkins, 2007a). Fanfiction.net alone has 2093 stories based in the Fringe universe(s).

The main offline extension of Fringe is the comicbooks, which contribute an insightful, though not essential, window into the backstory of some of the main characters (Walter Bishop and William Bell), but also standalone stories about events that form ‘the pattern’ happening to otherwise unmet characters. Jenkins (2006b) believes comics can be used to fill in gaps in a story and to expand the timeline and the Fringe comics fulfil this function, showing that they are a contribution —not a leech— of the ur-text.

Thus far there is no evidence that fan action (e.g. discussion boards or fanfiction) has altered the content of the TV show, however it has had an impact on the show’s longevity. Grassroots movement ‘the Fringe Movement’ was born in response to FOX’s decision to move the show to the ‘Friday Night Death Slot’. Dependent on ratings for survival, Fringe needed to keep up viewer numbers so the various grassroots Fringe sites began a campaign (Jenkins, n.d.) to promote the show and do just that (The Fringe Movement, 2011). Extensions, however, do have an effect on the interpretation of the ur-text content. The comics allow for a new understanding of the relationship between Bishop and Bell and the online discourse seems to offer almost as many different interpretations of the ur-text as there are people with opinions of it.

Jenkins (n.d.) states that participatory culture is forming around horizontally integrated media that encourages “the flow of images, ideas and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship” (emphasis added). Jenkins also believes that there is no single ur-text in a transmedia narrative and that the story cannot be fully experienced without consuming all segments (2007a, 2009d). This certainly is a problem if (passive) viewers just want to watch the show, as Bordwell (in Jenkins, 2009c) contends. With the exception of the comics, you do have to watch the show to enjoy the extensions, but as Ross (2008, in Jenkins, 2008) asserts, with Fringe “you don’t have to go online to enjoy the show”. In this respect there is no need to seek out extensions to enjoy the Fringe story and as long as etiquette is followed with regard to signposting spoilers (Gray and Mittell, 2007), passive audiences do not need to engage with extensions at all if they do not wish to, thus extensions are not a detraction from enjoyment. The exception to this was the much slated ‘Twitter TV experiment’, where a live Twitter debate regarding the program was displayed on the bottom of the screen as the episode was broadcast. Audiences found this annoying and distracting and subsequently the experiment was dropped (Eaton, 2009).

Extensions such as merchandise can generally just be seen to capitalise off the success of the show, though in some instances the term ‘profit’ may be going a little far as oftentimes e.g. desktop wallpapers are free to download or the result of engaging with other extensions, e.g. the hidden glyphs game on the FOX site. Profit may be accrued by the inclusion on DVDs of ‘bonus’ material such as behind-the-scenes footage and blooper reels, which do not contribute to the actual narrative being told, but do contribute to the knowledge pool of fans and thus their holistic experience.

In conclusion, narrative extensions are engaged with by fans who are excited/intrigued by the storyworld and desire either to expand their knowledge of a world or to share their knowledge, feelings and thoughts regarding the narrative with a community of other fans, to fill in gaps in the narrative (either by consuming more canon material or by creating it, as in fanfiction). Viewers who do not want to use narrative extensions do not have to to enjoy the story and can easily avoid extensions, including spoilers, so long as etiquette is not breached and they are clearly signposted.

Alt. Universe Articles that have to be unlocked using the glyph code cipher (Appendix I) and are news articles from the Altiverse, e.g. regarding JFK’s actions in the UN, of which he is a current member,

Fringe Files which is an interactive application enabling UGC [EXPAND ON THIS],

Science of Fringe in the form of downloadable lesson plans pertinent to each episode,

hidden elements game where you have 60 seconds to locate all the glyphs in the picture to unlock exclusive wallpapers;

Secondary official extensions include:

the Massive Dynamic (MD) website alternative reality game (ARG). Massive Dynamic is the fictitious biomedical research company that serves as antagonist for the first season. At time of writing, the website has an employee access point (which currently denies all access attempts) and a careers section where fans can submit their resumes.

a website run by the creative team for fan interaction with them and among themselves (Fringe Division);

Twitter accounts: @FRINGEonFOX (main); @JWFRINGE & @JPFRINGE (producers); @LabDad1, @FringeLabRat, @PeterBishop1 (characters) that are used for that are used for promotion and interaction with fans, including encouragement for fans to play the ‘spot the Observer’ game.

Spot the Observer game – the Observer, occasionally a supporting character, is hidden in every episode that he is not featured in and viewers attempt to spot him. Screenshots of his sightings are posted on fans sites such as FringeTelevision.

Glyphs code game – The glyph code is a simple substitution cipher. The decoder (Appendix I) is available from Fringepedia. The glyphs are shown immediately prior to the commercial breaks in the original broadcast and together spell out a word that is pertinent to the theme of the particular episode.

These enigmatic ads, did not actually name the show, but the repeated phrase ‘find the pattern’ served to intrigue listeners who would then search for the phrase online and find one of two identical websites (see Appendix II) that played trailers for the show, introduced the glyphs and the comics (FringeTelevision, 2008)). Through these paratexts, audiences got a taste of what was to come and were actively invited to participate (Jenkins, n.d.).

prelaunch websites

SearchForThePattern.com

ExploreTheImpossibilities.com

smart/iPhone apps (e.g. glyph decoders).

Grassroots/non-official extensions:

Fully-dedicated websites

FringeTelevision: http://fringetelevision.com host ‘discussion Wednesday’ where a recent or future plot twist can be discussed amongst members; collect and discuss the various esatereggs; link to the other Fringe websites; also run a YouTube and a Twitter account)

Fringe Network: http://fringenetwork.com/ . In response to the show being moved to the ‘Friday night death-slot’, Fringe Network launch ‘the Fringe Movement’. “The Fringe Movement has joined forces with other Fringe fans to become a united FRINGE NETWORK. We promote the show through a series of projects and campaigns. Help Fringe become a Friday night treat! Objectives: (1) To spread the word about Fringe’s new night and to encourage U.S. fans to watch LIVE (2) To keep the international Fringe community informed and united about the show (3) To welcome new fans to the worlds of Fringe! No matter what world you’re from, you can get involved – volunteer NOW!”

Now, I don’t generally post my fiction online, but in honour of the fact that someone (Dan Clarke – Forge Audio Designs) has actually written a musical score —and this score fits like a glove— for the first Fragment of my creative dissertation, I feel I should. So here it is:

The blindfold is tight, but he can see his own feet. Soon he begins to smell chlorine. Before he can ask if they’re at the swimming room the blindfold is off. There is no one else there. The whole room is a pool, no edges, just a sloping floor from his feet to the far wall.

“Are we allowed to be here?”

“Of course,” she tells him, removing her robe and stepping into the water.

He baulks for a second, but his adolescent body senses an opportunity. Quickly he strips too and joins her in the water. Laughing and splashing, it’s several minutes before he realises the door has sealed. He looks to her in query.

“—?”

Before he could speak, the pool cover slid out from the tiles at the sloped edge of the pool, decapitating the crests of the water on its way toward him. He’s not panicking yet, but he feels an edge. He swims to the far wall looking for her, but she is gone. The cover slides onward, he’s got just metres left. He tries to pull himself up on the vertical surface, but it’s futile. Seconds. Get cut in half or to go underneath it? He takes a deep breath, ducks beneath.

The cover closes, seals shut. There’s no room beneath it. His lungs suck the oxygen out of his last breath with greed. He feels his epiglottis clamp shut as he claws at the cover. Chest heaving, blood rushing to his head, struggling to keep afloat. His lungs feel like they will explode. Desperately he crams his face against the cover trying to salvage any air, but it is useless. As the oxygen in his limbs runs out he starts to sink. Beside him, she reappears. She is not struggling. She treads the currents beneath the water with ease, her hair undulating around her.

He feels the skin and muscles of his neck straining, feels it tearing open. His fading vision shows her indicating first her neck and then his.

In describing The Color Purple (1982) as a ‘womanist’ fiction, thereby following the ethic of “women who love women —and sometimes individual men— sexually and/or nonsexually” and “feminists of colour” (Walker, 1983 in Berlant, 1988), Alice Walker effectively declares her work a critique on patriarchy and racism, of which the former will be the focus here. The ways in which Walker exacts her critique centre on several subversions and a proposed alternative model. Primarily, the subversions involve the breaking of silence through language, Black Vernacular English (BVE), laughter and song (Tucker, 1988; Hite, 1983; Abbandonato, 1991) and the use of the feminine, personal narrative forms of quilting and epistolary (Selzer, 1995; Berlant, 1988; Abbandonato, 1991). Additional subversions include the usurping of the conventional hetero-normative love story (Abbandonato, 1991; Hite, 1991) and showing how men can also suffer under patriarchy by being forced into a gender role to the exclusion of what they may prefer, for example Albert’s youthful enjoyment of sewing (247). As contrasted with the grim beginnings of the story, Walker also critiques patriarchy implicitly by offering us a happy ending couched in a redefined, alternative view of how the world could be. This alternative model centres on the linguistic reappropriation of female anatomy and sexual desire (Abbandonato, 1991; Hite, 1991); the ‘disgendering’ and decentralising of God (Abbandonato, 1991; Hite, 1991); and how male acceptance of the fluidity of gender roles ultimately brings happiness and balance (Selzer, 1995; Hite, 1983). This discussion will balance these factors against the contentions of critics that the critique is intrinsically flawed and will conclude in Walker’s favour.

Hite argues that Walker uses the “Afro-American motif of ‘finding a voice’… to decentre patriarchal authority”, allowing women to alter meanings through “articulating and appropriating the dominant discourse” (1983:265). Celie starts the novel by erasing herself from the present[/-tense] when she writes ‘I am’, and subsequently attempts to build herself up from this “site of negation”, a burden shared by all women who try to forge an identity noncompliant with the cultural scripts of gender and sexuality entrenched in patriarchy and manifested through a man-made language (Abbandonato, 1991).

Reaffirming what Tucker calls “language as power” (1988:82) and “[a]ware that ‘the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 1999, in Abbandonato (1991:1108), Walker succeeds in offering a different view of the world in part through Celie’s rejection of Standard English (SE). Despite Darlene’s advisement to adopt the ‘proper’ mode of speech (194), Celie finds her voice and her self-worth whilst still writing her letters and ‘speaking’ in BVE. According to linguistic relativity, the language we use shapes our perception of the world (Whorf, 1956), so for Celie, talking in SE means that “pretty soon it feel like [she] can’t think” (194). Of course, SE is also an allegory for patriarchy, both of which she ultimately rejects, reflecting “only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind” (195).This non-conformity shows her resistant position outside the dominant system. Furthermore, “Celie’s vitality is privileged over Nettie’s dreary correctness” Abbandonato (1991:1108) and thus SE’s position as linguistic exemplar is challenged.

Redefining female sexual anatomy (“shifting emphasis from lack or hole of patriarchal representation,” Hite (1983)) permitting female sexual pleasure (Shug’s redefinition of the word ‘virgin’ (Hite, 1983)) and re-envisioning a genderless, colourless, pantheistic God who “love all them feelings” (176) are all done linguistically and collaboratively between women —Celie and Shug— and threaten “patriarchal control over women’s bodies” (Hite, 1983:226) and minds. This collaboration is symptomatic of the novel’s ‘quilting’ narrative, achieved via the collaborative epistolary of Nettie and Celie. The story is the synthesis of many voices —not just one— Walker is merely the ‘medium’ (262). This is a firm rejection of the patriarchal view of the author as godlike, single source of all information and meaning (Abbandonato, 1991:1108).

bell hooks, for example, cxritcises The Color Purple for its emphasis on gender issues over racial ones believing that the focus on sexual oppression damages the racial agenda of the slave narrative tradition it is clearly drawing from (1990, in Selzer, 1991). Considering how pervasive inter-racial issues are in the novel, this criticism may be damning on a racial front, but it serves as an affirmation of the critique of patriarchy. This is not to say, however, that there are no detractions from the critique. Harris found little to applaud in the novel at all, likening it to a compendium of “political IOUs” (1984:160), but while the novel does address a lot of salient and controversial issues, they do not serve to weaken the gender critique, in fact, as Berlant (1988) points out, in some instances the racial issues serve to enhance/reinforce the gender issues, such as the lynching/rape parallel. Harris, however, damns the gender critique along with the racial one. Firstly, she criticises the use of a male narrative model to critique a male system,

“Celie will break her bonds and take symbolic vengeance on those who will attempt to hurt her… as other heroes triumph over the forces that attempt to destroy them in their youth… The fabulist/fairy-tale mold [sic] of the novel is ultimately incongruous with… its message…” (1984:159-60).

While it is clear to see the typical hero story in Celie’s, rather than condemning the use of a male form for the transmission of a feminist message, it can be understood as another subversion – a male form used inside the female form or indeed as a fusion of the two.

Secondly, Harris argues that ‘between the lines’ the novel affirms that Celie’s (and by extension all women’s) “… patience and long-suffering… passivity… silence in the face of, if not actual allegiance to, cruelty… secrecy concerning violence and violation…” (Harris, 1984:160) will lead to a happy ending, essentially reiterating the demand for female silence inherent in patriarchy. Harris argues that Sofia is “beaten, imprisoned and nearly driven insane precisely because of her strength” (1984:157), which effectively conveys the message ‘woe betide women who stand up for themselves’; Sofia may be alive and reunited with her family by the novels’ close, but she is far worn down. Harris believes this inaction destroys the critique from the inside out, but what action could Celie have successfully taken until she had support and somewhere to go? When these criteria are met, she does act. Harris is also critical of the African sections of the book. However, they actually serve to highlight women’s inequalities across cultures, for example being denied education. Furthermore, that Nettie reaches the same conclusions in Africa— about things such as God— as Celie does in America also reinforces Walker’s critique.

Inversely, does The Color Purple go too far the other way in portraying a totally matriarchal society? After all, there is only one example of a ‘good’ (and unchanged) man who exists under the new regime, Sofia’s brother-in-law Jack. As Harris points out, “…all the bad guys are dead or converted to womanist philosophy.” Really, though, that is the point: the only way for the oppressed to be happy is to eradicate all the oppressors or convert them. Moreover, by presenting a fairy-tale element to the final Edenic (Hite, 1983) utopia where everyone is happy Walker emphasises the difference between the patriarchal status quo and her new vision, thus enhancing the critique.

From the beginning of the story where patriarchy’s pervasive, quotidian oppression of both women and of men is shown to keep everyone by-and-large miserable, to the ending with a re-envisioned, redefined world in which the characters are happy, The Color Purple successfully critiques patriarchy and shows how language can be as equally the instrument of freedom as it has been the instrument of captivity.